The present disclosure relates generally to the operation of a central plant for serving building thermal energy loads. The present disclosure relates more particularly to systems and methods for distributing building thermal energy loads across a plurality of subplants configured to serve the building thermal energy loads.
A central plant may include various types of equipment configured to serve the thermal energy loads of a building or campus (i.e., a system of buildings). For example, a central plant may include heaters, chillers, heat recovery chillers, cooling towers, or other types of equipment configured to provide heating or cooling for the building. A central plant may consume resources from a utility (e.g., electricity, water, natural gas, etc.) to heat or cool a working fluid (e.g., water, glycol, etc.) that is circulated to the building or stored for later use to provide heating or cooling for the building. Fluid conduits typically deliver the heated or chilled fluid to air handlers located on the rooftop of the building or to individual floors or zones of the building. The air handlers push air past heat exchangers (e.g., heating coils or cooling coils) through which the working fluid flows to provide heating or cooling to the air. The working fluid then returns to the central plant to receive further heating or cooling and the cycle continues.
High efficiency equipment can help reduce the amount of energy consumed by a central plant; however, the effectiveness of such equipment is highly dependent on the control technology that is used to distribute the load across the multiple subplants. For example, it may be more cost efficient to run heat pump chillers instead of conventional chillers and a water heater when energy prices are high. It is difficult and challenging to determine when and to what extent each of the multiple subplants should be used to minimize energy cost. If electrical demand charges are considered, the optimization is even more complicated.
Thermal energy storage can be used to store energy for later use. When coupled with real-time pricing for electricity and demand charges, thermal energy storage provides a degree of flexibility that can be used to greatly decrease energy costs by shifting production to low cost times or when other electrical loads are lower so that a new peak demand is not set. It is difficult and challenging to integrate thermal energy storage with a central plant having multiple subplants and to optimize the use of thermal energy storage in conjunction with the multiple subplants to minimize energy cost.